Hand from Above from Chris O'Shea on Vimeo.
SPRXmobile announced Wednesday that the long-awaitediPhone version its Layar augmented reality browser is now available in the Apple App Store, free-of-charge (note: for background on the Layar platform--which leverages smartphones' integrated GPS and compass capabilities to display layers of interactive digital information on top of real-time video on those phones' camera screens, thus effectively transforming reality into a giant, clickable interactive video--see the articles published on itvt.com, June 17th, July 9th, August 18th and September 27th, and the interview with SPRXmobile co-founder, Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald, published July 16th). The browser launched this spring on the Android platform: at the time, developers were unable to publish iPhone AR applications in the Apple App Store, because the iPhone SDK lacked public API's for manipulating live video, and the method that AR developers had found to work around this limitation--via a restricted tool called "Camera Viewer"--was not approved by Apple. This situation (which resulted in a number of AR developers launching a petition to Apple Developer Relations, asking the company to "provide a public API to access live video in real time, on the iPhone") was remedied by the launch last month of iPhone OS 3.1, which officially supports AR.
In other augmented reality news:
- IAC/InterActiveCorp-owned restaurant information/recommendation service, Urbanspoon, has added AR functionality to its iPhone application. The new functionality, dubbed "Scope," is triggered when users aim their iPhone at the horizon. It presents them with icon overlays that provide basic information on nearby restaurants (type, distance, popularity, price) and that can be clicked/tapped in order to access more detailed information (including reviews). The further away a restaurant is, the smaller its icon, and the less popular it is, the grayer its icon. The app also allows users to adjust it to compensate for any shortcomings in its GPS positioning.
- UK artist, Chris O'Shea, has created an augmented reality artwork, called "Hand from Above," on the BBC's Big Screen display in Liverpool. Pedestrians walking by the display see a giant hand poking, tickling, flicking and otherwise interfering with their video image. Video of the artwork, which was created using openFrameworks and openCV, is embedded above.
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